Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Health Care - What way is best?

This might be a bit “hard hat”, I guess it depends on who reads it and how they feel about the subject.

I was having dinner with some British and American friends the other week and the subject of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) came up. Also state pensions, Obama’s ideas and the System in the UK.

And do you know… No one was saying the NHS was sacred or anything? Not like you see on the news and from UK politicians.

The best anyone would say was it was good for public health in general to keep up basic good health and immunisations, make sure babies of trashy parent/s got their vitamins.

They said it was waay too expensive, crippled by bad practices and brought down by too many over paid under talented managers who got themselves into deals called public/private partnerships, about building and leasing hospitals back that no one who knew what they were doing would have signed up for.

Apparently some “Trusts” in London are basically bankrupt over them and people may even be dying because of it.

Someone said if the NHS refuses to give a treatment, maybe for a cancer drug banned by this “Nice” (Is that Newspeak for Nasty?) committee and the patient buys the drug privately they get their NHS treatment cut off as a punishment. That sees quite evil to me. Sure gets rid of critics tho.

They also said you could die because of how slow it could be to get treatment..

But weirdly if the “Nice” people say you can have it, you might still be refused it.

They also said the NHS and State pensions were basically Ponzie schemes.

They were didn’t like how it treats seniors either.

So they didn’t like the level of service it delivered.

For all of that I don’t think they wanted to junk the NHS out of hand. More cut it massively down to size to a sort of basic safety net if it could not match the levels of service you get if you pay privately in the UK.

OK comments please.. Agree or disagree? What do you all think? Is it fine? is it broken? Is it fixable?